Tag Archives: compost

In May this year the Kitsap County commissioners included food waste in the yard waste pickup. Last month Alex and I found out about this and immediately ordered a yard waste container from Waste Management. Some items we compost ourselves – vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells. Other items can only be composted in high temperature operations, like weeds, dairy and meat; now we can give those to WM to take to a commercial compost operation. Hot diggity dog! We were so happy. We immediately repurposed our kitchen garbage can from landfill bound items to yard waste. Now we put out both the recycle can and the yard waste can every other week and haven’t yet put out the landfill can. There are still things we can’t recycle: plastic containers and bags, light bulbs, broken glass, but the volume of these is pretty small. We have a good collection … Continue reading →

When we started our garden we knew we were going to need compost. Mel Bartholomew (the Square Foot Gardening guy) encourages every gardener to start a compost pile. His casual invitation made the process sound easy but we still had to overcome a remarkable reluctance to get the process started. The only people we knew who had a compost bin were Ted’s aging parents, and they had stopped composting some years back. Would it be hard? Would it look bad and smell up the garden? Would our friends and neighbors think we were hippies? Ted’s parents used a wooden bin system. I knew I wanted a closed bin that we could keep close to the house. I stumbled on an Earth Day sale at CompostBins.com. They offered the Earth Machine Compost Bin at a starter price; I fell in love with this because it looks just like a Dalek (the … Continue reading →